DMD Staff

Blair Drenner, vice president of strategic business development at 

, emphasizes in this clip how critical communicating effectively with your dental patients is.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“I think the best way to optimize your lifetime value of patients — of course there’s being a great dentist and providing great services and consults – but I often think of it in terms of how many times that person has engaged with you and keeping them up front and personalized.

Watch: Make Your Dental Equipment Purchases Pay Off

Number one is delivering personalized content that’s applicable to them. Meaning, if they’re aging, that you have a care plan that’s specific for their age or gender. The other thing is just making sure that your face comes across as someone friendly to your customer base.

I find, oftentimes, that the way dentists communicate to their most valuable asset, which is their customer base is very bland and generic about procedures rather than a personal touch by them and a consultative care methodology.”

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Blair Drenner, vice president of strategic business development at eRelevance Corporation, emphasizes in this clip how critical communicating effectively with your dental patients is.

Communicating with Your Most Valuable Asset: Your Dental Patients

, discusses how dentists should divide and allocate money for savings into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals.

“When should a dentist plan on setting up short-term, mid-term and long-term savings strategies? It’s really going to depend on a few factors. When a dentist is first getting into practice, there’s a lot of expenses, there’s a lot of unknowns, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Right then, their first motivation of getting things accomplished is about the practice. A lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy is going to be invested in the practice.

As an advisor, we want them to start pulling money for their hard work into accounts that they recognize for their future. We look at different short-term, mid-term and long-term strategies to accomplish that. A short-term strategy would just be money in the bank, money available for emergencies, money available for emergency situations both personal and business.

The long-term strategy would be retirement. It would be saving for their children’s education.

Somewhere in the midterm would be maybe their second home, or saving for their second practice.

Our strategy is, if you have a dollar, you want to put a certain percentage of that in short-term, a percentage in mid-term and a percentage in long-term. You’re not just putting that one dollar away into one of those areas and letting the other two suffer.

Say a dentist wants to buy their next practice in five years. That’s going to be something we’re going to heavily invest that dollar in, maybe 60, to 70, to 80 percent of that would go short-term, and long-term — retirement – that is going to be a little more deferred for later on. If their goal is retirement, retirement, retirement, then we’re probably only going to put 20 percent in short-term and keep putting as much as we can toward the long-term goal.”

Randy Fine, LUTCF, president of Robert Fine Associates, discusses how dentists should divide and allocate money for savings into short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals.

How Dentists Should Set Attainable Financial Goals

Mayer Levitt, DMD, is president of the dental consulting firm, 

. Here he discusses what dentists should be doing to retain staff members in their practices.

“There are certain things that have to go into an order and a sequence. I would say that it’s probably the doctor’s responsibility to create a fabulous work environment. I think that dentistry, just like any other business, the most difficult challenge is building that great staff that stays with you. A great, customer-service oriented staff where people really, really get it. That’s the hardest thing to do, whether it’s in dentistry or in any other kind of business.

I think that in order to be able to attract that kind of staff you’ve got to offer state-of-the-art benefits to be able to do that. People are not going to come and work for you if you’re not providing health insurance, if you’re not eventually going to be able to give them some kind of benefits, in terms of pension, or that kind of thing. You need to be able to do this. And you don’t want to be penny wise and pound foolish.  If you’re paying people, I’d like to see you be paying more at the top of the scale because I don’t want these people looking every month on Craigslist, asking, where should I go?

Keeping the staff, even in the most optimum situation, two people work, husband gets relocated, the wife gets relocated, somebody has their third kid, all of these kinds of things happen, and it’s that dreaded conversation: ‘You know, doctor, can I see you at the end of the day?’ And you know that something bad is going to be coming.

The other thing that I would say is that as a doctor, as the owner, you need to be continually coaching your staff, and you’ve got to be continually praising your staff. This is what they want to be able to hear. I think if you can do that and be a great manager, which you don’t learn in dental school, you’re going to be quite successful.” 

Mayer Levitt, DMD, is president of the dental consulting firm, Jodena Consulting. Here he discusses what dentists should be doing to retain staff members in their practices.

Tips for Retaining Your Dental Practice's Staff

, discusses how methods of attracting new dental patients to practices are evolving. SEO is still the dominant force at play, he says, however, social media is gaining strength.

“What’s the right way — best practices – to get a patient from outer space, the internet, into a dental practice? Of course, traditional, proven methods, are fairly simple. You have search engine optimization, which is just optimizing certain keywords in a geography. In other words, ‘dental implant Naples.’ A consumer goes online and searches ‘dental implant Naples,’ that phrase has been optimized for that practice, the person shows up, and they click on it. That’s one way, probably the most traditional way.

What we’ve seen now though is a huge shift in the emergence of social media. It’s not just Facebook anymore. While Facebook is probably one of the most cost-effective mediums, you’ll see dentists now getting creative, actually doing live treatments or live procedures on Facebook. But you’ll also see Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn is also a great place in terms of getting credibility, credentialing, establishing a presence and also back-linking.

I think SEO — whether it’s Google, Bing, Yahoo, all the major search engines – will be the number one for a while. Any modern dentist’s practice needs to take into account social media.

One final note on social media: A big mistake that practices make when they think about social media, they think about, ‘I want to put a picture of a dog driving a car.’ And they get 15 likes, and they feel good about that. They say, ‘I got 15 likes.’ And I’ll say to them, ‘OK, but how many implants did you do from that post?’ And so what we advocate for in terms of best practices is whenever you’re posting on any social medium, make sure that you’re creating a link from that post back to the associated landing page on the site. It’s about traffic. Likes and shares are great, but it’s about traffic.

It’s getting those folks to the appropriate landing page. If it’s any type of cosmetic procedure, have a nice before and after gallery. Have a contact form with a call to action. And then just rinse and repeat.

I don’t think it’s one thing, but I think it’s taking into account there are a lot of new, emerging mediums that are effective as well.”

Tim Sawyer, president of Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, discusses how methods of attracting new dental patients to practices are evolving. SEO is still the dominant force at play, he says, however, social media is gaining strength.

How To Bring In New Dental Patients From the Internet

Blair Drenner, vice president of strategic business development at eRelevance Corporation, discusses how to make your major dental equipment purchases pay off.

“Some of the major keys to insuring you optimize your investment in dental purchases, especially around major equipment, is to make sure you have a good marketing plan before you go into the purchase. A lot of it has to do with ensuring that your existing customer base knows that you have a new procedure coming out, or a new service, and really segmenting that customer base into someone that would be applicable to receive that procedure.”

Make Your Dental Equipment Purchases Pay Off

Brandy Keck, Brockerage Liaison at Carr Healthcare Realty, discusses what dentists need to consider when analyzing the current real estate market.

“What dentists need to consider when they’re analyzing the market is really looking at their market individually and apples to apples comparisons with other properties. Depending on the market you’re in, that can vary by landlord to landlord. That can vary by suburb. It can vary by zip code. You really need to make sure that when a dentist is looking in a given area that they are really taking a deep dive into the market that’s very specific to them, and getting as much information as possible on multiple properties at one time.”

Brandy Keck, Brokerage Liaison at Carr Healthcare Realty, discusses what dentists need to consider when analyzing the current real estate market.

Market Factors for Buying a Dental Practice

Kerry Straine, CPBA, CEO and President of Straine Consulting, discusses how important it is to set an economic vision as well as a personal mission for your dental practice.

“They keys to setting an economic vision and mission for a practice really begin with: What’s in the owner’s heart? How do they want to serve? Who do they want to serve? What type of dentistry do they want to deliver? What do they want to give? Ultimately, it’s as if they’re treating their family, is how they express their mission statement. But ultimately, when we set a vision economically, we have to begin with their personal budget. It would be impossible to run a business and own it and operate it without achieving a certain economic outcome for the individual owner. When we begin helping a client assess what should the production goals be — the collection goals, the hours of operations, the type of dental procedures – it’s really up to them, but then we have to make it fit so that the production yields a collection rate and then when you subtract the overhead, the debt services, the taxes, the retirement, the lifestyle, the working capital reserves, we make sure we have a plus at the bottom line.”

Setting an Economic Vision for your Dental Practice

Aetna’s attempt to purchase rival insurer Humana has been thwarted by a federal judge.

 that U.S. District Judge John Bates halted Aetna’s plan to purchase Humana for roughly $34 billion on Monday. Bates 

 that such a merger would ultimately thwart competition in the insurance marketplace, the AP reports.

The AP also quotes an Aetna spokesman as saying an appeal is under “serious consideration” by the company.

Last summer, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit to stop the Aetna-Humana merger, as well as Aetna’s attempt to acquire Cigna Corp. No decision has been filed on the Cigna acquisition, the AP reports. The DOJ had expressed concerned that the merger would take the market of five major insurers to three, driving down competition for individual Medicare Advantage plans and for policies sold on individual exchanges.

Aetna had planned to sell certain Medicare Advantage assets to Molina Healthcare to appease the court, but that proposal wasn't enough.

There would not be enough new entrants into the market to replace the competition lost to the merger, the court said in its decision. The most favorable competition analysis to the defandants put the likelihood of a new market entrant to replace lost competition at 25.5 percent. Other analyses put the estimate at as low as 10 percent.

So, even under the most generous of the plausible calculations the median county has a 13.3% chance of experiencing any entry, and a 25.5% chance that this new entry will be sufficient to replace the lost competition," Bates wrote. "There is therefore a relatively small chance overall of replacing the competition lost by the proposed merger."

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The U.S. district judge wrote in his opinion that the merger would ultimately thwart competition in the insurance marketplace.

Judge Rejects Aetna's Bid to Buy Humana

Do you know the difference? Mortgage debt that is less than a quarter of your gross income is unlikely to be bad debt, unless you are paying an out-of-market interest rate for some reason. Student loan debt is often among the best debt, because it generally has a low interest rate. But credit cards are almost always bad debt, no matter how many miles you may be earning.

Address your debt as swiftly and directly as you can, but not at the expense of future planning. Differentiate between long-term, good debt, and high-interest rate bad debt; the latter should be paid off as quickly as possible, whereas the former can be managed alongside a solid investing strategy. In the meantime, make sure you aren’t accumulating new debt, as it will completely counter your strategy.

Look to the past to map your financial future. “The Intelligent Investor,” by Benjamin Graham, is cited by legendary investor Warren Buffett and many others as their inspiration will give you a great feel for investment basics. It is considered by many to be the bible of value investors. Value investors are great investors to emulate.

The general rule of thumb in retirement investing is to try to replace 70 to 80 percent of your pre-retirement income in retirement, with appropriate adjustments for the expected inflation rate. But for most people, spending will peak in their mid-40s to early 50s. From there income may still go up, but spending is likely to decline. If you base what you need in retirement on what you’re spending now, you may be overlooking an overall dip in your expenses as you near your late 50s.

When was the last time you adjusted your tax withholding? Don’t let the federal government borrow your money at no interest while you could be putting it to work. If your life situation has changed, either through marriage or divorce, or the birth of a child, or even if you’ve simply had a significant adjustment in your practice’s revenue, you should probably update how much you set aside for federal and state taxes. 

This month's topics include good vs. bad debt, paying down debt quickly, compelling and edifying financial reads, and appropriate levels of retirement savings.

Fast Financial Facts: Brush Up on These Quick Money Tips

In this video clip, he discusses how to take a fresh look at occlusion issues in dental patients.

Taking a Fresh Look at Occlusion Issues in Dentistry

Jim McKee, DDS, is a dentist in private practice. He’s also a Visiting Faculty member with Piper Education and Research Center, where he teaches on subjects such as occlusion and the clinical referral process. In this video clip, he discusses how to take a fresh look at occlusion issues in dental patients.

“When you look at the average patient who comes into your practice, typically, the patients will come in with problems caused by one of two things. Typically, it’s either bacteria, which causes decay, or periodontal disease, or some type of bite issue, some type of an occlusion or TMD issue that may cause some type of tooth wear, some type of tooth fracture. It may be linked to sleep-disordered breathing. We have to look at all of those issues.

We’ve done a great job in dentistry treating bacterial problems. We’ve done a great job treating decay and periodontal disease. The difficult issues that we still have, though, are the occlusion, TMD issues. Many times, it’s because we define occlusion as how the teeth fit together, when in reality, occlusion needs to be defined as, not only how the teeth fit together, but how the lower and upper jaws fit together.

While we have to look at the teeth, we also have to look at the right joint fitting against the right-joint socket, and the left joint fitting against the left-joint socket. In order to do that, sometimes it’s necessary to get three-dimensional imaging using MRI and CBCT. If we can obtain that information, then we have an entirely new set of information that we can use to help solve occlusal problems and TMD problems that are so pervasive in all of our practices.

The number of Class 2 patients that we see typically in an average orthodontic practice is going to be somewhere between a third and a half. Most of those patients are going to have some type of TMD problem. So it starts early. The changes in the joint are reflected through changes in the bite.

Being dentists, we’re trained at the tooth level, so we do a great job trying to change the teeth. The problem is, if the main cause of the issue is at the joint level, and we’re treating at the tooth level, that may lead to inconsistent treatment outcomes. In terms of today, I think the contemporary restorative dentist really looks at the occlusion from the tooth level as well as the joint level to understand the risk profiling that’s present in our cases. It’s the same way as probing periodontal pockets in our practice today. We’re going to be able to evaluate risk factors for soft and hard tissue from a periodontal aspect, we can do the same from an occlusion and TMJ aspect as well.”

Jim McKee, DDS, is a dentist in private practice. He's also a Visiting Faculty member with Piper Education and Research Center, where he teaches on subjects such as occlusion and the clinical referral process. In this video clip, he discusses how to take a fresh look at occlusion issues in dental patients.